1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the monitoring of a website and the interaction of a client with a website and with other persons via website- or email-based communication. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for passively monitoring online video viewing and viewer behavior.
2. Description of the Background Art
Video clips may be supplied to viewers from any website for information, entertainment, or advertising purposes. Some of these websites may be Web 2.0 websites where a user can create an account, upload, share, contribute, comment, vote, or read personal opinions of other users, all on the same site. When video clips are viewed purely for entertainment purposes, users may be more motivated to rate a particular video clip according to their preferences. However, not all viewers expend the effort to rate a video, even if they feel strongly about it.
Video sharing and online video services allow individuals or content publishers to upload video clips to Internet websites. The website stores the video clip on its server, and provides different types of functions to allow others to view that video clip. These websites may allow commenting and rating of a video clip. Many services have options for private sharing and other publication options. Video sharing services can be classified into several categories including, user generated video sharing websites, video sharing platform, white label providers, and web based video editing.
As video hosting websites become increasingly popular, such websites provide a platform for traditional publishers, such as television broadcasters, to use these websites as another medium to display media content which may be of a more informative nature. For example, CBS and CNN networks often publish video clips on YouTube. For such publishers it is highly desirable to know the ratings of their published video clips. In television the ratings, e.g. Nielsen Ratings, estimate the audience size and composition of television programming, and thus determine advertising rates. This method is not applicable for the Internet. Again, given the opportunity to rate a particular video clip, not all viewers expend the effort to rate the video clip, even if they feel strongly about it.
Either independent of, or associated with, entertainment or informative video clips, advertisement video clips may also be supplied to online users. Supplying websites may or may not provide users a means to rate such advertisement clips. In circumstances where the advertisement is embedded as part of an entertainment or informative clip, such as a pre-roll advertisement, offering users a voluntary rating facility for the advertisement portion becomes difficult from a practicality standpoint.
In the related art there are different techniques to determine the popularity of a website. One technique known in the art refers to “page-hit” (or “page views”). The “page-hit” refers to an event in which a server receives a request for a page and then serves up the page. A common measure of traffic at a website is the number of page hits, especially in an advertising context, for particular pages or sets of pages. Page hit counts are a rough measure of the traffic of a website. Other techniques involve the analyzing of the traffic between a Web server and clients. Such prior art techniques work well when the traffic of interest relates to particular pages, but are generally not informative when traffic by topic is desired because one page may relate to multiple topics. Systems have been suggested for embedding script code in web pages for tracking user activity on a web page.
Another technique for determining the rating of video clips published on online video sites is based on viewership information provided by these sites. Typically, the sites count the cumulative number of users who view the clip. However, more refined measurements that include, for example, the quantity and characteristics of viewers, as well as detailed information about the duration and repetition of each view, are neither generated by video sharing websites nor by any other prior art technique. Furthermore, viewership information is easily manipulated by the use of, for example, scripts, browser refreshes, and other means that skew the results. As a result, ratings measurements that are based on the viewership information are inaccurate at best and often misleading.
Systems have been suggested for placement of advertising slots in hosted video clips. In such systems, methods are used to track the ad placement and viewing. Such methods require preparation of the video clips for ad placement.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution for online video analytics for generally available video clips on the Internet.